Just as thoughts are random my posts seem to be becoming more and more random... I can never complete what I start and branch off into so many things at the same time... some of the charm lies in that I suppose, considering it is called articulating confusion...
But getting back to things around me, one of the biggest things in the city has been Municipal Corporation' sealing drive...
I haven't been able to figure it all out but some stuff, since i was covering it i wrote an impulsive mail to my dad about the strangeness of the whole thing; it follows:
It is really disillusioning considering that it is so politically motivated and so strange- the protests I mean... I was talking to ******** yesterday and something he said made some sense and articulated my discomfort with what is happening- HE said it is Mandal all over again and that's really true considering the designer wear aunties and the blond streaked hair uncles screaming and shouting how all this is so unfair....
There are all kinds of problems with it, one of them being wherever there are the Black protests flags of the traders accompanying them are the BJP flags
the people on the streets are not the people who'll suffer the most cause they have just given up and so much noise is being made cause the people being affected are the ones who can afford to make all that noise...And the ones who are throwing stones etc are mostly hired goons or passers by who like the excitement of being on air
God it is embarrassing to see what people can do for a TV camera!!! The camera goes left the protesters go left, it goes right they go right, it goes back they come forward... and all the screaming and shouting is reserved for the camera... I have been to more than one protest of the kind.
Also the whole scene reminds me of the "sting operation" that Tehlka did with the defence deals, and weren't they able to do it cause someone for the congress was supporting them...?
well if that is the way things are it is a bit disheartening
I can't make up my mind if i am on any one's side at the moment... much more to say, but later have to rush now.
:)
Labels: Quasi Political
posted by reality check @ 6:34 AM
2 Comments:
Hey, when are you buying yourself a decent computer and get online so that you can do more of this at home ? i am sure you have a hundred stories waiting to be told -which can never be told when you are on your job but which must be told. where exactly did this anger come from ? i heard a very similar story from another source who said that the anger that she saw on the streets especially among the middle class was scary. and she too said it reminded her of antimandal agitation. where is this anger coming from ? what does it build on ?
why does it seem so powerful even as it stands on the
backs of the fishmongers and the headloaders ?
if that is one set of questions, there is another set of questions, who exactly are these protesters ? if they are largely punjabi hindus, then are they conscious of their partition histories ? the trading class in delhi is really a fascinating one - how from being a displaced people in 1947 they have turned into such a powerful bloc in the last 50 years in the city's economy. we need to hear all those stories. and you are actually situated so advantageously to hear and tell those stories.
A.
all this speaks to a couple of
other emails from the forestrights mailing list.
To begin with, I found that statement anurag posted -
which attempts to make a sort of common cause between
the tribal in the forest and the 'trader' in the city
- very intriguing. why now ? This partcular
formulation if I am not totally mistaken has been
circulating since the slum evictions in bombay last
year. rajesh's response to it compounded that sense of
intrigue - what is it that makes such a common cause
seem unlikely ?
and then viren's latest email says that things are all mixed
up because there is an increasing shift in the indian economy towards
service sector employment, and self employment etc., and that this shift
queers the relationship between capital and labor. but
before we argue that such a shift has or is occurring
- i think we should first look at what the evidence
for the shift is. my hunch from looking at decadal
data from the economic surveys and census data etc.,
is that certainly while there has been a stagnation
and even decline in some instances in manufacturing
jobs, and government jobs, and in general unionized
jobs, the diversity in the wage form in the Indian
economy has always been a staggering one. piece rates,
contract work, hawking.... add to it the variation in
the types of work that one does across time-
seasonally and across space through migration
strategies etc., what we have an economy that could
never have been conceivable in classical capital wage
labor terms on an aggregate level. so there is one set
of questions here that needs to be thought through
carefully - how is labor and surplus to be
conceptualized in such a situation to arrive at any
useful political formulation. in practice i think
indian marxists and by that i mean the entire spectrum
have been a lot wiser than to get caught in
restrictive categories in actual practice. when they
did, people always corrected them. this is why you see
such an extraordinary variety of leftist formations at
the organizational level across india.
But to get to the questions that Anurag and Rajesh's
points prompt I am wondering if have we now reached a
point where some sort of a fundamental shift - more
than the shift from formal or informal employment - is
occurring. Think of these strange conicidences. Just
when Shramik Sangathan is calling for common cause
between tribals and traders Tehelka is calling for a
summit of the powerless - state, corporate sector and
the poor. when i first looked at the website, I was
struck by the oddness of the name - summit of the
powerless ? where two of the three parties the state
and the corporate sector should by convention be
anything but powerless. why are they participating ?
could they be consciously or unconcsiously seeing
themselves as powerless ? But see the historical
significance of the summit - the Nehruvian era which
is sometimes thought of as the Indian variant of
Keynesian compact was about the state, capital and the
labor (nevermind that left out most of India). That
compact has broken down world over as it has in India.
But unless there is some sort of a stable compromise
capital cannot be confident of returns on investments.
There can only be so much coercion. Howmany tribals
can you shoot down ? Howmany times can you tear gas
factory workers ? Just think of all the big
investments projects that have gone sour over the last
10 or 15 years in India. The number of governments
that are threatened by recalcitrant coalition
partners. Is the summit of the powerless then an
attempt to produce at least symbolically that historic
compromise? Given all the good governance,
accountability, etc., stuff going around I am inclined
to think that the summit of the powerlss indeed
reflects a deep turbulence and a desire for a stable
regime of accumulation that is just eluding most
countries world over. what we are seeing is catch as
catch can, flybynight profit making. but everybody
feels uncomfortable about that. it is heady but you
never know when you will sink. that is why DLF
building india feels the need to promote two indias
one future! (look at the sponsors of the summit). The
shramik sangathan statement itself is an attempt to
build an alliance that will have a greater capacity to
negotiate within that context.
But will it work ? How can it be made to work ? What
sort of a new deal is one looking for ? who are the
right allies ? given the ways in which the structure
of the nation state itself has changed, given the
ways in which capital is now coursing through a
variety of interlocking structures some regulated
mostly unregulated - what would be the correct
strategy ?
If these are the sorts of questions we are asking then
it seems to me that we need to be asking more
searching questions about how historic blocs arise in
the Gramscian sense rather than how class
consciousness develops in the western marxist sense.
within that broad framework i think we need to be a
lot more attentive to the material practices and the
basis of social power in everyday life than we tend to
be. for instance - if we ask what is it that ties the
tribal to the trader we need to start with let us say
the tamarind that the tribal picks- sells to the local
trader which then gets processed and packed and sent
to the local wholesaler from where it goes to another
market from where it gets transported to the outskirts
of the city from where it then goes to the wholesaler
and then to the retailer. there is labor, cash, caste,
local social convention, multiple investments in
places, cultures and practices markets all along the
way so intricately connected to each other which
determine not only the rate of profit but actual
outcomes for both individuals and to corporations.
in this context we must recognize that the traders in Delhi are not a
homegenous class of propertied or non propertied,
capitalist or non capitalist in any simple way.
the social base of these protests is
an extremely complex one. it has its roots in real
estate but it is not real estate in the clean title
ownerships sense but in the sense of multiple claims
and entitlements and investments including those whom
we consider the working class. their money is tied
into the social artifact that we know as the shop.
that is the lot with whom shramik sangathan can make
common cause but in order to be able to make that
common cause we need a much more nuanced understanding
of property, labor, surplus, and entitlement. to
extend viren's point - where do we place the self
employed people in class terms ? super self exploiting
labor-capitalist ? where do we place the 22 year old
boy who came from jallundhar to work for the uncleji
in GK with the hope of striking out on his own in a
few years and is investing in small chitfunds ? or the
bhayya who comes from sitapur near lucknow to earn
enough to repay the loan on his wife's surgery and get
some english medium education for his son and invests
in a local blade company ?
i guess in some sense i am asking for a sort of route
map for what Rajesh suggests - getting away from party
based politics - where to ? how ? what are the actual
step by step activities that need to be undertaken to
do that? one suggestion that the email i forwarded
makes is that we should be skeptical of the categories
through which we look at the world and be a lot more
attentive to the lived life. something that most
organizers do by instinct and many scholars tend to
shy away from.
anant
so what do you think is happening?
does it link to the history of the city. have you relatives who could have been part of this group? what would your raection have been in such a situation?
you get involved in your stories. good
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